The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) is a nuclear power plant located on the Pacific coast of California. The 84-acre (34 ha) site is in the northwestern corner of San Diego County, south of San Clemente, and surrounded by the San Onofre State Park and next to the I-5 Highway.This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday I learned that copies of both my books (Shut San Onofre, my new 20-page pictorial book, and The Code Killers, my handbook of nuclear information from 2008) have been personally handed to California's Senator Dianne Feinstein (possibly with a photo of the event taken by the Sacramento Bee),and to Vermont's Senator Bernie Sanders. The books were also given to an environmental aide to Jerry Brown, and Congressional candidate Norman Soloman, who was already calling for shutdown of California's four nuclear power plants at Diablo Canyon and San Onofre... (see Norman Soloman articles below)

" The new book only happened because someone asked for a short document to hand out at the then-upcoming Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearing held last Thursday in San Juan Capistrano, California. Of course it helped that I had been collecting hundreds of images for the past six weeks... I thought about what was needed for a day or so, and started creating the document on Wednesday, the day before the event, having decided to try to "say it with pictures" in a one page flyer. Almost immediately it didn't fit on a page, hence the new book..."

Diablo Canyon Power Plant is an electricity-generating nuclear power plant at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California. It was built directly over a geological fault line, and is located near a second fault. The plant has two Westinghouse-designed 4-loop pressurized-water nuclear reactors operated by Pacific Gas & Electric. This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons

On the edge of Capitol Hill, day after day, we heard wrenching testimony from people whose lives had been ravaged by the split atom.

That was three decades ago.

I was coordinating the National Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims in 1980, one year after Three Mile Island. The voices came from uranium miners, atomic workers, veterans, downwinders exposed to atmospheric nuclear bomb tests . . . and many others. The people who testified were from a wide array of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. But in addition to radiation exposure and suffering, they had one huge experience in common.

They'd been lied to—not once or twice, but repeatedly. Year after year.

There is no danger, the officials told them. You are safe. Radiation levels? Not to worry. But gradually, the clusters of cancer or leukemia or severe thyroid ailments or birth defects became too conspicuous to ignore. Still, officials kept saying that the nuclear industry was blameless.

But later, declassified documents would tell a very different story. Government and corporate officials, committed to nuclear agendas, were careful to suppress key facts, trash critics, excel at media spin—and treat employees and the public as expendable, best kept in the dark.

Now, as catastrophe has struck at nuclear reactors in Japan, I feel a terrible sense of return to the future. From Tokyo to Washington, the authorities are doing all they can to downplay realities. The oxymoronic talk is about "safe nuclear power"—right up there with "jumbo shrimp" and "clean coal."

Who do they think they're fooling?

The facts all point to this “inconvenient truth” -- the time has come to shut down California’s two nuclear power plants as part of a swift transition to an energy policy focused on clean and green renewable sources and conservation.

The Diablo Canyon plant near San Luis Obispo and the San Onofre plant on the southern California coast are vulnerable to meltdowns from earthquakes and threaten both residents and the environment.

Reactor safety is just one of the concerns. Each nuclear power plant creates radioactive waste that will remain deadly for thousands of years. This is not the kind of legacy that we should leave for future generations.

In the wake of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, we need a basic rethinking of the USA’s nuclear energy use and oversight. There is no more technologically advanced country in the world than Japan. Nuclear power isn’t safe there, and it isn’t safe anywhere.

The perils to people are clear. In a recent letter to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein noted that “roughly 424,000 live within 50 miles of the Diablo Canyon and 7.4 million live within 50 miles of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.”

As someone who was an Obama delegate to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, I believe it would be a tragic mistake for anyone to loyally accept the administration’s nuclear policy. The White House is fundamentally mistaken in its efforts to triple the budgeting of federal loan guarantees for the domestic nuclear power industry, from $18 billion to $54 billion.

Our tax dollars should not be used to subsidize the nuclear power industry. Instead, we should be investing far more in solar, wind and other renewable sources, along with serious energy conservation.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a nuclear-friendly fox guarding the radioactive chicken coop. The federal government has no business promoting this dangerous industry while safe and sustainable energy resources are readily available.

The fact that federal law imposes a liability cap of about $12 billion on a nuclear power accident is a reflection of the fact that those plants are uninsurable on the open market.

As a candidate for Congress in the district that includes Marin and Sonoma counties, I intend to make this a major campaign issue. It remains to be seen whether my one declared opponent, Assemblyman Jared Huffman, will join me in urging a rapid timetable for the closure of California’s nuclear power plants.

Huffman has ties to California’s nuclear-invested utility PG&E. Between 2007 and 2009, according to campaign finance data compiled by nonpartisan Maplight.org, he received $11,100 from PG&E, which owns and operates the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant.

While Huffman and other state lawmakers in February signed a letter to a federal commission on America’s nuclear future citing seismic “concerns which deserve to be more closely examined,” the time for equivocation on nuclear power is long past. We don’t need yet more study on whether to operate nuclear plants on fault lines.

People want bold and responsible leadership as we face up to the well-documented realities of nuclear power on this fragile planet.

Norman Solomon was the director of the National Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims in 1980 and co-authored “Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation,” which exposed the health and environmental effects of the nuclear industry. For two years ending in late 2010, he served as co-chair of the Commission on a Green New Deal for the North Bay. For more information, go to: www.SolomonForCongress.com.

In 1947 Albert Einstein wrote:

"Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since the prehistoric discovery of ﬁre. This basic power of the universe cannot be ﬁtted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense, there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world.

"We scientists recognize our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of the simple facts of atomic energy and its implications for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope—we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not death."

In San Francisco, the AA Clearinghouse and allied organizations held a speak-out and open mic at the Federal Building on April 26th. photo: indybay.org

Activists in the Bay Area are marking the 25th Anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster with rallies, speakers, street theater, and educational events. Calling the Ukraine catastrophe "the most significant nuclear reactor failure in the history of nuclear power", anti-nuke enthusiasts say they want the world to remember that April 26, 1986 was the day when one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power station exploded, killing plant employees instantly and leading to a projected increase in cancer deaths in the hundreds of thousands.

Tri-Valley CARES, Plutonium-Free Future and other groups concerned about the proliferation of nuclear power sponsored a panel discussion on April 10 in Oakland called "A Quarter Century of Chernobyl". The panel featured Russian women activists with first-hand experience in that nuclear reactor disaster.

In Menlo Park, a community demonstration at the busy downtown intersection spilled over to a nearby outdoor cafe where lunchtime patrons became the audience for street theater with an anti-nuke message.

In San Francisco, the AA Clearinghouse and allied organizations held a speak-out and open mic at the Federal Building on April 26th. The origins of AA Clearinghouse lie in the Abalone Alliance that was formed in 1977 as a nonviolent civil disobedience group to shut down the Pacific Gas and Electric Company's Diablo Canyon Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County. That nuclear power plant is seeking recertification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission today. Some of the participants in Tuesday's demonstration took part in the blockades and occupations at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant site during the years between 1977 and 1982.

The Abalone Alliance itself was closed in 1985 with the Clearinghouse taking on the responsibility of holding onto the history and resources of the Alliance in the Bay Area.

The goal of Nuclear-Free Planet is far-reaching public education about the often underestimated and poorly understood medical hazards of nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Our focus is on the grave danger posed to public health by radiation, by the contribution of nuclear power to global warming, and by the real capacity of nuclear weapons, technology, and waste, to render parts or all of the earth uninhabitable forever.

Call to Action.

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow.
- Martin Luther King, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.

from A MEDICAL PROBLEM OF VAST DIMENSIONS -Let us be clear: there are billions and billions of dollars at stake for the nuclear industry, which has, as I’ve written earlier, managed to bamboozle governments around the world , much of the press, and many ordinary citizens into believing that nuclear power is green and clean. Nothing could be further from the truth. The industry will not walk away from that money without a fight.

As we move through this critical decade of climate change, we cannot afford to look backward: to an energy source that consistently fails to live up to its promise of being safe, clean, and inexpensive. Instead of energy “too cheap to meter,” we have a worldwide clean-up bill too great to calculate. As we take critical first steps towards disarmament, we face a proliferation problem induced by the international spread of nuclear power that may rival the dangers of the Cold War. We cannot exchange global warming for nuclear winter. The fate of our fragile planet rests in our hands.

To this end, we look toward a sustainable future, toward the development and use of truly renewable energy sources, at the interconnectedness of all life, and the implications of our actions on the world that we live in. We need to think in long terms. With education comes the responsibility of action. We must be vigilant, efficient, and outspoken. If the world is going to change, we need to change with it. If we want peace, we need to speak out against war and unforgivable weapons.

Our reliance on fossil fuels and nuclear energy is destroying the earth that we live on. It threatens not only our future, but the future of life as we know it. We must stand behind, and shore up the regulations we have to prevent this; demand without compromise that new, better, regulations be enacted; and insist that the use of these energy sources be stopped. If we allow partisan causes to divide us we will fail. If we let generational differences divide us we will fail. The future belongs to all of us.

Martin Luther King, in a piece called Acceptance, said: "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people." Almost 50 years later repentance may be due, but the time for acceptance is over. From the youngest child, to the eldest elder, we must speak together with one voice. We must end the appalling silence of the good.

Beyond Nuclear aims to educate and activate the public about the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the need to abandon both to safeguard our future. Beyond Nuclear advocates for an energy future that is sustainable, benign and democratic. The Beyond Nuclear team works with diverse partners and allies to provide the public, government officials, and the media with the critical information necessary to move humanity toward a world beyond nuclear.

In nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry, nuclear fission is a nuclear reaction in which the nucleus of an atom splits into smaller parts (lighter nuclei), often producing free neutrons and photons (in the form of gamma rays). The two nuclei produced are most often of comparable size, typically with a mass ratio around 3:2 for common fissile isotopes.[1][2] Most fissions are binary fissions, but occasionally (2 to 4 times per 1000 events), three positively-charged fragments are produced in a ternary fission. The smallest of these ranges in size from a proton to an argon nucleus.

Fission is usually an energetic nuclear reaction induced by a neutron, although it is occasionally seen as a form of spontaneous radioactive decay, especially in very high-mass-number isotopes. The unpredictable composition of the products (which vary in a broad probabilistic and somewhat chaotic manner) distinguishes fission from purely quantum-tunnelling processes such as proton emission, alpha decay and cluster decay, which give the same products every time.

Nuclear fission products are the atomic fragments left after a large atomic nucleus fissions. Typically, a large nucleus like that of uranium fissions by splitting into two smaller nuclei, along with a few neutrons and a large release of energy in the form of heat (kinetic energy of the nuclei), gamma rays and neutrinos. The two smaller nuclei are the "fission products."

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Einstein said,
"The splitting
of the atom
changed everything
save man's mode
of thinking;
thus we drift towards
unparalleled catastrophe."
He also said,
"Nuclear power is a hell of a way
to boil water!"

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My hope here is to recover a portion of my expenses for the purchase of a new laptop, pay for some of the monthly expenses for #OccupyNuclear, and just to have something to live on for a little while. Please see the gofundme page for a little information on my situation.

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original content copyright Robert Cherwink 2009 - 2013
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